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If we could place this compact on a turntable and watch the countless yellow dots on a red background spin wildly to the sound of music, we might have found a way to get dizzy without spending a fortune. The reason is simple: The Darkside is a shard originating from Spacemen Three. The bassist Pete "Bassman" Bain and the drummer Stewart Roswell in 1990 performed the same operation as the former rhythm section of Loop (The Hair & Skin Trading Co.), leaving behind an "overbearing" guitarist to steer their personal space journey. A couple of pushes against those minimalist barriers that beautifully imprisoned the matter to give more importance to the rhythm pulses. And so it often happens to tap your feet to the patterns that govern tracks like "She don't come" which grab the Velvet Underground by Lou's wiry hair in order to bend them to the needs of psychedelic dances. Or unleash in the funky groove of "Soul Deep", where this time it's James Brown being dragged by the chest hair onto the dance floor.
Pete Bain's bass is the picklock that opens the door: no Jimi, no party. And so the opener "Guitar Voodoo" shows new guitarist Kevin Cowan cautiously venturing into Hendrixian swamps, working with wah-wah and distorters while the drums and bass lay out a soft tribal carpet for him. And it's really strange, because a track like the title track turns back the clock to the '70s, when a few whispered words over the splashing water of some mysterious psychedelic ocean managed to spread the scent of Indian hemp in the atmosphere. And the Byrdsian jingle jangle of "Good for Me" is drowned in the reverberations and whirls of that ocean until it crashes upon a rock to discover it is indestructible. The journey into the dreamlike universe of Opal to find love on the notes of a Farfisa in "Love in a Burning Universe": echoes of sounds from far back in time resurface with a sweetness that can only do good.
And maybe they really find love in "Found Love" which wraps the Reid brothers' feedback with bass lines just as Sonic Boom might have done if they had listened to them. But it's better this way.
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